>>>>Mexican Drug Cartel could be clients.
Oops, finding stuff now (more coming):
2003, Mexico City: Residents of América’s largest metropolis live in fear of kidnappings, rape, and murder. A city perceived by the foreign press as “lacking rule of law” stumbles through another decade of the drug war with crime on the rise. Enter Rudy Giuliani to bring his crime fighting expertise to Mexico City’s embattled residents – many of whom call themselves Chilangos.
The formula is largely the same, except that this time Giuliani wasn’t elected. He was not hired by any public agency or official. His consulting firm, Guiliani Partners LLC, was hired by a group of private business interests led by Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man, for a stated price tag of $4.3 million. But when Giuliani Partners announced its 146 recommendations of how to fight crime in the nation’s capital, Mexico City’s police chief and Mayor hailed the recommendations and announced they would adopt every single one.
The whole process had the look of a well-orchestrated show: in January, Giuliani toured Mexico City’s toughest neighborhoods, surrounded by 300 bodyguards (as one journalist asked me, “Does he walk around New York that way?”); in early August, the city government appeared with the Giuliani recommendations in hand, confident that Mexico City would follow in the footsteps of New York City’s reportedly historic crime rate drop. By September, Mexico’s downtown historical district already sported new video cameras and mounted police monitoring the streets.
Underneath the gleam of new police uniforms and in the backrooms of business suites used for triumphant press conferences exists a more complex reality. Just as the residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant, (a historically poor neighborhood in New York’s borough of Brooklyn), and the employees of legal aid and the New York’s mayors office know, as residents in the northern barrios of Mexico city and keen businessmen downtown all know, there is more behind the official version of this story.
continued with excerpting:
Pepe Martinez, a nationally syndicated Mexican columnist and author of the definitive biographies on two of Mexico’s richest men, Carlos Slim (Carlos Slim: Retrato Inedito. Oceano publishers, 2003) and Carlos Hank González (Las Enseñanzas del Profesor: Indigación de Carlos Hank González, Oceano publishers, 1999), tells Narco News that the Mexican side of this story can be traced back to September 11, 2001. As Rudy Giuliani began his political resurrection as the stand-in Commander and Chief, Carlos Slim donated large sums to aid New York. Little more than a year later, with Rudy Giuliani in private-money-making mode, and considered on the short list of future Republican Presidential hopefuls, Carlos Slim offered him $4.3 to lend Mexico City a hand.
Interestingly, Mexico City’s leftwing mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD, in its Spanish initials) soon joined his Police Commissioner Marcelo Ebrard in welcoming Giuliani’s report. Here are some of Mexico’s most powerful figures – politicians with aspirations, Mexico’s richest man – Slim – who has a history of philanthropy, but no aspirations to run for office himself (according to biographer Martinez) – standing together in an unconventional marriage. But, what about Mexico City’s 12 million-plus Chilangos – where do they stand in this equation?
There is no doubt that many city residents live in fear of crime and there is a pervading sense that something must be done. In that sense, most residents seemed to welcome a new approach and many were open-minded about the Giuliani announcement. But the questioning began in many circles even before the 146 planks of the crime plan were announced.